1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the generation of an adaptive personalized entertainment experience (comprised of music, music videos, etc) that is customized for each user and more particularly to a system and method for providing a customized entertainment experience based upon capturing a history of user control actions (such as forward and back) while each composition is playing, in-order to automatically adapt the future sequence of compositions for each user.
2. Description of Related Art
Existing methods for entertaining a listener (or viewer) with music or music videos (or other entertainment) have numerous limitations that result in a less than an ideal user experience.
A major limitation with broadcast media such as radio and television is that the user has no control over the channel stream. If the listener does not like the current composition, the listeners only option is to change to another station or channel. However, there is typically a limited number of alternate channels of music suitable for the user. In addition, to switch quickly to a suitable alternative channel requires the user to have found and pre-selected the alternate channels of interest. When the user does switch channels, the new channel will most likely be somewhere in the middle of a composition, advertisement or other audio presentation. Recently commercial-free radio is being offered via satellite radio (e.g., XM Radio) and some internet radio stations, but the music is not customized to each user. Another major limitation of broadcast is that there is no link between the broadcast stream and the user's music collection. If the listener does hear a song they would like to add to their music collection, they typically need to remember the artist, album and song so it can be located or acquired at some later time. Often, the information needed to acquire a song (artist, album, title, etc) is not available at broadcast time when the listener is interested in it.
A major limitation of purchased albums on media such as CD's, DAT, tapes, and DVD's is that the user must expend considerable effort to be able to identify what they want and then to locate the media at a vendor and then purchase it. In order to purchase a media, the listener must be able to identify the specific album desired by artist and album name. Each purchased media may include many compositions that the user does not want. Sometimes the listener may purchase the wrong album by mistake. Once purchased, the listener must provide physical storage for the media and then later locate and insert the media to playback the compositions. To playback a particular song, the user must remember the particular media (e.g., CD) the song is located on and then be able to find that specific media among perhaps 100's of similar looking media. The user must also coordinate and physically transport the media between the user's various locations and devices (e.g. home, car, portable player, etc). Often, a desired album's media may not be at the desired user's location. In addition, media players hold only a limited of number of media so the user is limited to a playback stream from a limited number of albums at any one time. For certain locations, such as in an automobile, the locating, handing and inserting the media may be a safety distraction. The order of playback is limited to the composition order on the media, the random ordering of the media compositions and/or perhaps a playlist the user manually defines. The media is subject to scratching or other physical damage, requiring the user to create backup copies or purchase replacement copies. The physical media may have a physical lifetime which is much shorter then the user's. In addition, due to the rapid rate of technological change, vendor support for a given media format may be less than the user's lifetime.
An emerging technology, is the storage and management of the user's music collection on the user's personal computer (PC). With compression technology (such as MP3 or WMA formats), approximately 2500 (near CD quality) songs can be stored per 10 Gbyte of hard disc capacity. Since PC's with 30 to 100+ Gbyte discs are now commonly available, now or in the near future, PC's will have sufficient capacity to hold a user's full music collection in compressed format. The user's collection is typically managed on the PC by interactive windows driven software, which the user must install and learn to use. The user must expend a significant effort to build their collection of compositions. The user may expend significant effort to convert their previously purchased media (such as CD's) into suitable compressed files on the PC hard drive. Even using high read/write rate drives, such a conversion could take 3 to 10 minutes per CD and 5 to 16 hours for a collection of 100 CD's. The quality of the compressed file is determined by the user's ability to operate the compression software and select the appropriate compression settings for each composition.
An emerging way of building a music collection on the user's PC is the purchase and down load of songs in a suitable compressed format across the internet. The major providers of downloadable songs include PressPlay, AOL MusicNet, FullAudio MusicNow, and MusicMatch. Users use the PC to locate, purchase and download new songs over the internet. A major limitation of this approach is that the user must be able to identify the artist, album and song by name. Disadvantages include that the user must manually locate each song within the catalog of songs in the provider's database, by typically either reading through an alphabetical list of songs by musical category (genre), artist, album or alternatively by performing a search for each song via a search tool. They may have to navigate a separate set of web pages to locate and download the composition. In some cases, a web page may provide a short sample of a song which may be heard before purchasing and downloading the full song. The user may have to wait while the download is occurring, in order to verify it downloaded correctly. An additional disadvantage is that the additional cost of the PC may exceed the cost of the user's playback device. In addition, the user must learn to use the PC and its software. The user must manage the downloaded composition once it's been downloaded. The user may have to manually create playlists and later relocate the user created playlists by the playlist name.
Some users have built a portion of their collection via music piracy and file sharing software, often using peer-to-peer networks across the internet. The user faces ethical and legal issues. The user faces additional security and privacy issues associated with the peer-to-peer networks and the associated software such as viruses, worms, spyware, and stealth software. In addition, the quality of each music file is unknown and not guaranteed, since there are multiple good, marginal, bad and bogus versions of each song out on the network. The user must expend effort to locate the artist, album and song. Then, after waiting for the download to complete, the user must determine if the quality of the downloaded song is acceptable, and begin the process again if the quality is insufficient. The quality of the pirated song may be well below the quality of the original version.
Once the collection is built, the user must manage their collection of songs on the PC storage device. Using windows driven software on the PC, the user must manually select among the songs in their collection to create one or more playlists. In addition, the user must periodically back-up their collection on the PC to protect against loss due to drive failure, fire, damage or theft. For large collections, this is so inconvenient and time consuming, it is often not done frequently enough or not done at all, placing at risk of loss of all the user's efforts in building their collection. There are many competing file formats (MP3, WMA, AAC, etc), which only operate with certain vendor's hardware and/or software. The formats are constantly evolving and may have a limited vendor support lifetime. The user's collection in a particular format may no longer be supported at some point in time, requiring considerable user effort to convert the collection into another supported format, if a conversion is even possible.
Several new types of music players, including portable players, have emerged that are capable of handling compressed storage formats. The user's collection and playlists for these devices are typically managed via interactive windows software on the user's PC. For players with limited storage capacity (e.g., SonicBlue Rio MP3 player), PC software is used to select a limited portion of the user's collection, which is then sent to the player's memory over a cable or loaded onto memory media or a memory device which the user can insert into the portable player. Some recent players (such as Apple's iPod, Creative's Nomad Jukebox Zen, or PhatNoise's PhatBox) have large enough hard disc storage (10 to 30 Gbyte) to hold a collection of up to 2000 to 8000 songs. Some players (e.g., the Apple iPod) auto-synchronize with the PC by plugging into a high rate interface cable. The PhatBox player, intended for installation in automobiles has a removable hard disk cartridge, that attaches to a PC cradle (USB 2.0 cable) for content management. The user's collection and the creation of user playlists are managed on the PC via interactive windows based software.
Another emerging technology is user customized radio via streaming across the internet, such as Yahoo LaunchCast. An automatically generated sequence of songs, custom selected based on the user's profile, is generated remotely at the service providers server. The stream is forwarded to the user across the internet to a player application located on the user's PC. Each user creates a unique profile using an interactive windows application on the PC in-order to select music categories and artists the user likes. The user also may provide additional profile feedback, while a composition is playing or by accessing the user's library, to rate each song, album and artist on a rating scale. A major disadvantage of LaunchCast is that there is no link between the user's radio profile information and the user's music collection [i.e., the user's usage-rights (e.g., listening-rights) to particular compositions]. Because there is no link with the user's listening rights, the LaunchCast user does not have the ability to go “backward” or to repeat a song or cause a particular song to played. If the user wishes to add a composition that is playing to their collection, they are only provided with a link to a web page where the CD may be purchased. A disadvantage of streaming is the skipping or jumps that occur if the continuous virtual bandwidth is interrupted by other network traffic. Another disadvantage of streaming is its limited tolerance to insufficient network latency, which can result in delays in the radio program, especially when the user decides to “forward” or “skip” over the currently playing song.
Other interactive internet based streaming services allow the user to create a custom playlist or multiple playlists of favorites, by selecting each song to include from a catalog of compositions provided by the service. A major limitation is that the user must be familiar enough with the composition to be able to identify the artist, album and song by name. In addition, the user must expend considerable effort to manually locate each song within the catalog of songs in the provider's database or the user's library, by typically either reading through an alphabetical list of songs by genre, artist, album or performing a search for each song by using a search tool. The user must continually and manually update all this as their musical tastes change over time. To generate a stream of songs, the user may then have to choose a group or order of particular songs to form a user's custom playlist. Another limitation is that the user does not own the music collection and does not own listening rights to the music. In addition, it is not integrated to other listening rights the user already has purchased.
In some internet services, the user may indicate the relative likeablity of each of the songs in their custom playlist. Typically, the user manually rates each composition based on a scale, such as 1 to 100. Which requires the user to manage in their mind the relative rankings of songs by rating number so one song has a higher number relative to another. In addition, the user must manually change their ratings and their playlists as their taste for songs changes over time. This typically requires a significant amount of visual interaction from the user, often with a PC windows based display, which is not suitable while driving an automobile or for many other activities.
More generally, the above discussion also applies to music videos, short films, movies, video programs, television, audio versions of books, talks, speeches, voice content, lectures, and any other type of composition. In some cases, the media formats will differ (DVD's or other formats instead of CD's), but the limitations discussed are generally applicable.